Naked, dreadlocked holy men yesterday were among hundreds of thousands of jubilant Hindu pilgrims who thronged the banks of India’s Ganges River, ignoring any COVID-19 threat, for one of the nation’s most famous and colorful religious festivals.
Authorities in Haridwar expect 2.5 million people for the Maha Shivratri festival, one of three auspicious bathing days over the next month as part of a major gathering called the Kumbh Mela.
Before dawn, men, women and children jostled for space along the several kilometers of riverbank before a brief plunge in the fast-flowing water, singing hymns and showering flowers into the Ganges.
Photo: AFP
Later, the highlight was to be a jubilant procession by groups of hundreds of Naga Sadhus — naked holy men with long dreadlocks, their bodies smeared in ash — before their dip in the holy town nestled in the Himalayan foothills.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has curtailed the Kumbh Mela, a mass event held regularly in various cities, and negative test certificates are, in theory, compulsory.
Announcements on the public address system in Haridwar blared out reminders to wear masks and maintain distancing.
Hindus believe that bathing in the Ganges would cleanse their sins and bring salvation.
Hindu mythology says that gods and demons fought a war over a sacred pitcher containing the nectar of immortality. Drops fell at four different locations, which now alternate as hosts for the immense Kumbh Mela gatherings.
Recognized as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2017, the last Kumbh Mela in Allahabad in 2019 attracted about 55 million people over 48 days.
It is usually a serene two-and-a-half-hour ride on Japan’s famously efficient bullet train, but on Saturday, the journey quickly descended into a zombie apocalypse, with passengers screaming in terror. Organizers of the adrenaline-filled trip, less than two weeks before Halloween, touted it as the world’s first haunted house experience on a running Shinkansen. On board one chartered car of the Shinkansen, about 40 thrill-seekers were ready to brave an encounter with the living dead between Tokyo and the western metropolis of Osaka. The eerie experience was inspired by the hit 2016 South Korean action-horror movie Train to Busan, in which a father and
The space rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period caused a global calamity that doomed the dinosaurs and many other life forms, but that was far from the largest meteorite to strike our planet. One up to 200 times bigger landed 3.26 billion years ago, triggering worldwide destruction at an even greater scale, but as new research shows, that disaster actually might have been beneficial for the early evolution of life by serving as “a giant fertilizer bomb” for the bacteria and other single-celled organisms called archaea that held dominion at the
PROPAGANDA: The leaflets attacked the South Korean president and first lady with phrases such as: ‘It’s fortunate that President Yoon and his wife have no children’ North Korean propaganda leaflets apparently carried by balloons were found scattered on the streets of the South Korean capital, Seoul, yesterday, including some making personal attacks on the country’s president and first lady. The leaflets attacking South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and first lady Kim Keon-hee found in the capital appear to be the first instance of the North Korean government directly sending anti-South propaganda material across the border. They included graphic messages accusing the Yoon government of failures that had left his people living in despair, and describing the first couple as immoral and mentally unstable. The leaflets included photographs of the
U-TURN? Trami was moving northwest toward Vietnam yesterday, but high-pressure winds and other factors could force it to turn back toward the Philippines Tropical Storm Trami blew away from the northwestern Philippines yesterday, leaving at least 65 people dead in landslides and extensive flooding that forced authorities to scramble for more rescue boats to save thousands of terrified people, who were trapped, some on their roofs. However, the onslaught might not be over: State forecasters raised the rare possibility that the storm — the 11th and one of the deadliest to hit the Philippines this year — could make a U-turn next week as it is pushed back by high-pressure winds in the South China Sea. A Philippine provincial police chief yesterday said that 33